Towards a Comprehensive Model of Mediating Frustration in Videogames

Topical Relations

Answering how any topic relates to my professional career may feel a bit slippery at times, though it’s rarely difficult. I work as a software developer and serve as the Technology Officer at the Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) Division of the University of Kentucky – a position that comes with a whole rack of hats. Even if you strip that down to the more familiar title of “programmer,” you’ll find it still maintains a curious relationship with nearly every other field of study.

Let’s grab something entirely at random – HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning). What do compression ratios, British Thermal Units, and humidity have to do with keyboard jockeys? Other than ensuring a comfy office, that is. Easy answer – heat. Tech enthusiasts may not like to admit it, but underneath the polished exteriors, the semiconductor chips that drive every electronic device are just glorified abacuses. At the core, we’re still dealing with binary zeroes and ones – each represented by a microscopic transistor, itself just a tiny electric gate. Control one and you’ve got a light switch. Stack a few billion, and suddenly you’ve got the horsepower to model climate systems, analyze chemical compounds, or run whatever device you’re using to read this. Of course, with great computing power comes a whole lot of waste heat. Touch a CPU mid-operation, and the blister on your fingertip will make its own argument. Without robust, reliable, and extremely well-engineered cooling systems, everything from mobile phones to courthouse networks would grind to a steaming, acrid halt.

That might sound like a tangent, but it illustrates the point – interconnectedness isn’t hard to find. At a glance, the article in question relates to my work because it touches on human interface design, a core component of what I do. Look a little deeper, and the real answer becomes even simpler: when you work with systems and synergy in mind, every topic connects.

Two primary questions stood at the center of the article’s research phase:

• How do players react to frustrating situations arising during gameplay?
• How do players keep themselves motivated during frustrating scenarios?

The broader investigation focused on how players manage to persist through games when those games become, for lack of a better word, un-fun. Or put differently – how does an activity that consumes time and productivity, offering little tangible reward beyond the joy of playing, manage to retain a player’s attention during its most aggravating moments?

To explore those questions, researchers conducted a pilot study designed to test a central hypothesis: that players maintain motivation through a desire to restore the effort-reward balance of gameplay.

It was proposed that players carry a kind of lingering internal focus – a vague but persistent drive that survives the frustrating moments. Because video game play is understood to be intrinsically motivated (Lafrenière et al., 2012, p. 827), it was further suggested that persistence stems from a contextual intrinsic motivation – an urge to return to the flow state where effort and reward align.

The core research followed a peer-reviewed model, relying on a focus group of three and a series of semi-formal interviews with nine male test subjects – all of whom self-identified as gamers.

A clear challenge with this approach is the heavy dependence on individual experience and personal interpretation. This type of data is soft – or more precisely, qualitative. Whether reliable or not, qualitative data often resists easy analysis.

To address the inherently subjective nature of the results, the post-interview data processing leaned on the Template Analysis method. According to Dr. Melhart, this model is specifically designed to uncover patterns within mixed qualitative and semi-qualitative datasets pulled from interviews.

The method uses any qualitative or quasi-qualitative data – usually interview transcripts (Brooks & King, 2014, p. 4) – to construct a continuously evolving template of codes (King, 2012, p. 426) that are later interpreted by the researcher (King, 2012, p. 446; Brooks & King, 2014, p. 8).

It’s All CRAAP

Passing or failing a set of acronyms doesn’t automatically determine whether a piece of writing belongs in the press or the trashcan. Still, a basic review rubric gives us a reasonable framework for evaluating quality.

Currency: Barring any truly disruptive breakthroughs in human psychology or interactive entertainment, the study’s subject matter and approach remain current by contemporary standards and references.

Relevance: From a personal standpoint, the study holds little direct interest. However, as mentioned earlier, all studies are relevant to all people once you consider how human knowledge interconnects. For those working in psychology or developing applications that engage directly with end users, this might not just be relevant – it could be essential reading.

Authority: The article is published on a site dedicated to gaming studies. It’s somewhat difficult to gauge its authority against others, as the study itself is breaking new ground. In effect, the research is helping to define its own scholarly space – and in doing so, it builds a kind of self-sustaining authority.

Accuracy: The language is professional and appears unbiased. That said, the heavy reliance on group-oriented qualitative research raises a caution flag – the risk of informational bias is present and worth noting.

Purpose: The stated goal is to open a new line of inquiry into games and player interaction. That may sound trivial on the surface, but it carries significant implications for anyone working in human-facing digital systems.

Like, Literary Reviewing

An extensive background summary and conceptual framework are both present and accounted for. Dr. Melhart structures his summary into clearly defined sections – offering a basic introduction, outlining the study’s purpose, detailing the methodology, discussing relevant theories, and defining key terms. Any flaws found in this article won’t stem from missing components. Structurally speaking, the foundation is solid.

Call Me Biased – Bigger is Better

Put bluntly, no ethical violations appear in the research. Dr. Melhart maintains a strong sense of neutrality – any sign of researcher bias is either absent or subtle enough to escape notice. That said, the study carries two serious flaws.

The first issue is scope. Consider the sample sources:

• A three-member focus group
• Nine male players interviewed

Altogether, the study hinges on just twelve participants. For the subject matter, this is an unacceptably small sample size. Worse still, it lacks any real diversity. All the subjects are male – and while it’s fair to say the gaming demographic often skews male, completely excluding female players injects immediate bias into the dataset.

Participant selection also relied on a loose combination of self-identification and peer suggestion. The first participant was chosen based on the criterion of frequently playing frustratingly hard games. From there, subjects were asked to nominate others who routinely played games considered hard or played on hard difficulty.

The study used a combination of selective and snowball sampling to try and offset selection bias. Even so, the small sample size and narrow demographic window introduce a significant weakness in the data – enough to undermine broader applicability.ess in representation. Enough to consider the entire data set poisoned.

Know Your Role

Dr. Melhart is quick to acknowledge the limitations of his research – most notably the small sample size and the potential for bias it introduces. He also addresses a more implicit limitation: this study is, by design, a prototype. Its results are not meant to stand alone, but to serve as a foundation for future, more comprehensive investigations.

The study presented through this paper has its limitations. The small sample size and inductive nature of the research make it akin to a prototype project. Nevertheless, the results of the study are promising and point towards new directions. Thus, the model is worth further development and research.
Melhart, D. (2018, April). Game Studies. Retrieved September 30, from http://gamestudies.org/1801/articles/david_melhart (p. 18)

Dr. Melhart also notes that his research does not attempt to differentiate between varying psychological profiles of player immersion – the so-called negentropic psychic states. He believes this omission has little bearing on the study’s overall data.

Overall, Dr. Melhart appears fully aware of both the strengths and shortcomings of his work. If there are limitations he failed to identify, they have escaped my notice as well.

Use It or Lose It

Choosing whether to apply or discount Dr. Melhart’s work in my own is an easy decision. This article is both unique and thorough. It blazes a trail for others to follow – doing so with full acknowledgment that there’s plenty of roughage left behind. I would confidently look to Dr. Melhart as a source of both data and inspiration.